Navy medic Raymond Torres joined the Navy to attend medical school and was assigned to a Marine Corps company. While tending to wounded Marines during the Khe Sanh battle, Torres was critically injured when a grenade exploded near him.

Air Force pilot Keith Connolly was among the first USAF units to be stationed within South Vietnam. During his second tour, he flew F-4 Phantoms targeting the Ho Chi Minh Trail and witnessed two of his men go missing after his plane had been hit.

Raised in the segregated South, Charles Brown thought his best shot at a better life was to join the Army. He was stationed with the 101st Airborne Division and quickly appointed platoon sergeant, leading search and destroy missions through the jungles of Vietnam.

As a military wife, Anne Purcell had already sent her husband off to war once before, in Korea. But less than six months after her husband Ben volunteered for Vietnam, he was reported "missing in action."

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On October 29, 1963, President John F. Kennedy meets with the National Security Council to discuss whether to support the overthrow of South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem. During the secretly recorded conversation, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the president craft a detailed plan involving Henry Cabot Lodge, ambassador to South Vietnam, Gen. Paul D. Harkins and the general of the South Vietnamese military, hoping to avoid setting off a civil war in the country.

On September 2, 1945, aboard the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay, World War II comes to a close when Japanese officials sign the unconditional surrender. Gen. Douglas MacArthur presides over the signing and delivers a short speech on the momentous occasion.

With the United States now entered into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt uses the occasion of Washington’s birthday to broadcast to the nation on February 23, 1942, an outline of America’s progress in the war.

In his Labor Day radio broadcast in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt reminds his fellow citizens of the need to devote America’s industrial effort to building weaponry in order to "crush Hitler and his Nazi forces."

In a broadcast from his home in Hyde Park, New York, on July 4, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt warns Americans who wish not to get involved in the war that "the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship."

On March 26, 1971, President Richard Nixon holds a meeting in the Oval Office with his National Security Council to discuss the war in Vietnam. The meeting is secretly recorded. Among the many topics he raises, Nixon recounts a prior conversation with House majority leader Hale Boggs on setting a date for the final withdrawal of U.S. forces.

In an October 12, 1973, interview, Col. Le Gran, U.S. deputy director of intelligence, discusses the discovery that North Vietnam installed SA-2 missiles in the southern city of Khe Sanh shortly after a ceasefire agreement prohibiting military incursion in South Vietnam was signed on January 27 of that year.